


Red Irish Setter

by SidingwiththeAngels



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, One-Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 12:27:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1266559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SidingwiththeAngels/pseuds/SidingwiththeAngels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I want a fic where Sherlock tells John, drunkenly or not, about Red Beard and how important he was. Then days or months later, John comes home with a surprise for Sherlock and hands him a little red puppy that looks like the old Red Beard and Sherlock names him Red Beard Jr or something like that and either kisses John on accident or purpose out of excitement."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Irish Setter

**Author's Note:**

> No Beta, done off of the top of my head after I requested the above prompt, and no one took my request. So I fulfilled my own Redbear needs!
> 
> If there are any problems, please point them out!

                Sherlock sat across from John, staring at his flatmate over the tops of their laptops. Nothing of any consequence had happened as of late, but he had had the sudden urge to deduce John once again. John simply ignored it. By this point in their friendship, it had become a second nature to him to ignore whatever Sherlock was silently brewing about, especially when it was about himself. The silence broke after nearly a half hour when John, standing to go off to the kitchen, spoke first.

                “Have you ever found it strange to stare at people like that?” he asked as he pressed the kettle on again. “Or do you not notice?”

                “Notice what?”

                John rolled his eyes with a small chuckle. “That answers that, then,” he murmured to himself.

                After the tea was made and a biscuit as taken out of Sherlock’s ‘private’ tin, for which John received a deathly glare, John sat back down at the table and started on his blog again.

                “Do people truly find it strange?” Sherlock asked a moment later, now having dropped his eyes to the screen of his laptop. He knew what ‘unbelievable’ expressions John would cast at him and truly didn’t want to see them again. He’d memorized them by this point.

                “You really think they don’t?” John asked in a tone that matched his disbelieving expression. One eyebrow cocked up, opposite eye narrowed slightly, mouth in a lopsided line as he spoke. Predictable.

                “Redbeard never did,” Sherlock muttered to himself. He then shut his laptop and moved off to the sofa so, once again, he wouldn’t have to see John’s expression. If the man overheard, that was. John’s aging was doing nothing for his eyes or ears, but he was also prone to distraction far worse than Sherlock was.  

                But Sherlock was not so lucky this time.

                “Redbeard?” John asked as he swiveled in his chair to face his flatmate. “Oh, don’t tell me. An imaginary friend? Mycroft told me you wanted to be a pirate.”

                Sherlock shot a glare over at his friend, hating that small smile that John was trying to suppress, and nearly bit off his tongue keeping his comment to himself. Something scathing would only send John out the door again. What if they had a case? So he kept it to himself and turned over, showing John and the rest of the flat the wonderful view of his back.

                It wasn’t until nearly an hour later – or, in John-time, two cups of tea, four biscuits, a text, a trip to the loo, and grumbling about his work schedule – that Sherlock deigned to turn over and look up at his friend again. John did not acknowledge Sherlock’s ‘reappearance’ as he continued to sip his cuppa and stare at the vapid programming on the telly.

                “He was my dog,” Sherlock said quietly.

                For a moment, he thought that John couldn’t hear him over the telly but then there was silence, the screen was blank, and John was looking over at him with the same patient expression John always gave when Sherlock said something important. This wasn’t important at all but the expression was still there. So Sherlock gave a sigh and started over.

                “He was my dog,” he repeated, his voice a little louder this time. “Mummy got him for me when I was five. Red Irish Setter. He was far too big for the house once he grew, but Mummy hadn’t known that when she bought him. Still, he was a good dog.” He turned onto his back so he wouldn’t have to look at John anymore. It felt something like a cliché therapist session now, his hands clasped over his chest as he spoke, but he didn’t care. This was a good memory. “Mycroft hated him. Used to complain that all the fur was getting all over his clothing. I was the one that kept picking up the clumps from the carpeting and rubbing it all over that ponce’s bed and clothes. I even taught Redbeard how to do it himself for things that were on the floor. He wasn’t a particularly smart dog, but he was friendly. I used to take him out to the parks when Mummy wasn’t looking. I was seven when she finally caught me. Told me I had to be thankful that I hadn’t gotten arrested for not having him on a lead. Who would arrest a seven-year-old for not having a dog on a lead?” He scoffed and made a vague hand-gesture as if he were brushing away his mother’s years-old concern. But then he paused and grew somber. “He used to sleep in my room every night. When he was little, he’d sleep next to me. When he got older, he’d take up the space of my bed. I’d sometimes have to sleep in the floor instead. But then when I got to Uni, I couldn’t take him with me. I was only there four months before my mother called me. Redbeard had tried to jump up onto my bed and broke his hip in the fall. He was too old. I took leave for a week to go home before they put him down.” His voice faded and his gaze grew distant. There were things that even John couldn’t know, the anguish of putting down his dog being one of them. He could still see so clearly being in the veterinary’s examination room with Redbeard on the table, looking defeating and weary until Sherlock came into the room, only to wag his tail so hard that he cried out in pain. They hadn’t given him any medication. They knew there was no point. Sherlock had held onto the dog’s face and kept his attention as he quietly recalled all the good times they’d had. Falling asleep under the tree at Christmas before they realized Father Christmas was a lie. Their first case together. Setting bunches of loose fur on fire just to hear Mycroft’s complaint about the smell. Chasing away the neighbour’s children and their cats. Taking a swim in local streams and tracking mud into the house. But then the veterinary came in and explained what would happen. Sherlock wasn’t an idiot. He was a first year student at Uni for Chemistry and he’d studied death since he was nine. That did not stop him, however, from coming apart at the seams when he saw his dog blink one last time then was still forevermore. His best and only friend was now gone. His first hit was the very next day.

                   John did not try to break Sherlock out of the faraway mindset Sherlock had gotten himself stuck in. He knew that the man needed this time – the past, really – so he left his friend well enough alone. He finished his tea, cleaned out the mug, and set off to bed without another word to the detective laying nearly comatose on the sofa, his eyes and mind in another place.

* * *

 

                Neither of them spoke about it afterwards, though John did notice when Sherlock shot glances at dogs as they passed parks or walked pavements around London. They decreased over time as the memory of Redbeard was gradually locked away again and pushed from the forefront of Sherlock’s mind. However, it did not leave John’s.

                 Sherlock sat in the living room on the floor, his faithful blue robe covering a day’s worth of unbathed stench and the hopelessness of days without a case. The detective stared at the walls as he tried to wait patiently for another case, but with every rubbish bin hit outside, with ever taxi cab horn blaring, with every passing movement outside the windows, his patience grew thing. John wasn’t even home to complain at either. He should have been. Throughout the day, Sherlock had checked and rechecked the doctor’s schedule to ensure that John would be home at 2:35. He got off of work at two, had to walk to the Tube which took five minutes, took three stops which took twenty minutes, then walked home which took another ten if he stopped for coffee. Why he stopped for coffee in the middle of the afternoon, Sherlock never understood. But it was now 3:15 and there was not a John to be seen nor heard at Baker Street. This increasingly frustrated Sherlock.

             Then the front door downstairs opened up. No ring meant no client. No knock meant it wasn’t Mrs Hudson’s ‘suitor,’ though they could have graduated up to comfortably entering each other’s homes. No thump of an umbrella meant it wasn’t Mycroft. So it had to be John. But the steps on the stairs sounded different. Slower. Heavier. John had a bad day at work, Sherlock could tell, and it frustrated him further. John would want to do nothing more than sit in front of the telly with a cup of tea – maybe his leftover coffee – and ruin his brain cells for the remainder of the afternoon.

           Sherlock growled with frustration. This was not going to alleviate his boredom. But then John stepped into the room, a suppressed smile fighting his features, and there was an extra lump on his chest. As he stood, Sherlock cocked an eyebrow at it but said nothing.

            “I’ve already spoken to Mrs Hudson about this,” John said as he stepped closer to Sherlock, both hands on the lump. “She said it was fine as long as it wasn’t too rowdy. But I figured it would help you, you know, between cases.” Then he opened up his jacket.

          Inside the upper inner pocket was a small red Irish Setter puppy, no more than seven weeks old. It opened its eyes at the sudden light and yipped in response. Then it squirmed around only for John to ease him out of the pocket and hold him out to Sherlock.

           Nearly in a shocked daze, Sherlock took the puppy into his hands and stared at it, not even flinching when it yipped again. Its dark brown eyes roved over Sherlock’s face then it smiled up at Sherlock as his tail began to wag furiously. The movement nearly wiggled the puppy right out of Sherlock’s hands so he pulled it close to hold it in his arms. With the warmth, the puppy turned over and dove its nose into the crook of Sherlock’s arm where he stayed and relaxed into a light sleep. Sherlock looked up at John, his mouth agape, and, for once, was unsure what to say.

            “I rang your mum,” John explained with a wide smile. “She sent a picture of Redbeard so I could find another one. Got a picture of you too but that’s not important. Anyway, I went looking for a pup a few days after you told me about Redbeard. It took a while to find one that looked like him. This one, well, this one was the closest I could get.” He fell silent and gave Sherlock an awkward smile, unable to assess what the detective was thinking.

          In truth, the detective couldn’t even assess what he was thinking. He hadn’t really felt this way since he was a child, but at least then, he had thoughts and bouts of gratitude towards his mother. This left him completely speechless. Then the pup nipped at his arm, pulling him out of his blank thoughts, and yipped at him to be put down. Sherlock complied. Once the pup began running around with a wobbly gait, Sherlock finally smiled widely at John – a true, genuine, only-for-John smile – and all but thrust himself upon John, wrapping his arms around the man tightly as his lips very suddenly and surprisingly found John’s. Before he could register what he had done, Sherlock pulled back and turned to the puppy that was now trying to jump into John’s chair.

            “Redbeard,” Sherlock called. He went over to the puppy and held him up so they were eye-level again. “You’re Redbeard too. You’re going to be a better trained dog. You’ll help me on cases and experiments and maybe I can train you to keep John’s dates out of the flat. Or Mycroft. Maybe both. We’ll see how smart you are. Oh, and this will help when I have to play blind for disguises…” His words faded as he walked around the room, holding the puppy close or holding him up to show him Billy and the bison skull and the books that John couldn’t reach.

             John, on the other hand, stood completely still at the door, frozen by the kiss and unaware on how to respond. It was a first for the both of them, not only just a kiss but any outward sign of affection that could not be misinterpreted for friendship. And John surprisingly found himself okay with it. Once the shock wore off, he gradually began to smile and watched his friend traipse around the flat with the puppy, its little yips accompanying the mad detective’s narrative about everything and nothing.

* * *

 

            John came home late a few months later, tired, ragged, and just needing for a cup of tea and a rest. He didn’t want to have to put up with Sherlock’s experiments or any training for Redbeard – Redbeard the Second, as he was officially called – or anything else that required more than minimal energy. But once he opened the flat door, he knew that his wish was more than going to come true.

            Laying in the floor, Redbeard was prostrate between the two chairs that usually faced each other, his legs pointed in every which direction he could manage. Sherlock lay perpendicular to the dog with his head resting on Redbeard’s stomach with his dark curls getting tangled in the dog’s long red fur. John knew it would be another interesting wakeup call later on, but he decided not to disturb it. Instead, he set his coat and shoes by the door, turned off his mobile, then laid down next to the detective, his head on the man’s chest and his hand on the dog’s neck. He felt a gangly arm wrap around his waist a moment later and smiled to himself before drifting off into a light doze.


End file.
